Music at St Matthew’s

Music at St Matthew’s is going from strength to strength. We provide many exciting opportunities for the children to nurture a love of music whilst developing their musical knowledge and skills.  At St Matthew’s a number of our staff are skilled, experienced musicians which means we are able to deliver the national curriculum for music fully and with passion!

Following the National Curriculum, children learn to:

Sing with expression, play tuned and untuned instruments with increasing control, improvise and compose music, use simple notation, listen with increased attention to detail, appreciate live and recorded music and develop an understanding of the history of music. The essential elements of beat, rhythm and pitch are taught progressively from Year R – 6.

Whole class music sessions are linked to the curriculum focus texts, where children learn musical skills within engaging and inspiring contexts.

In year three and four every child learns to play the recorder with one of our specialist music teachers. Children learn to read stave notation and have the opportunity to perform at our Christmas Carol Service and also at the Tunbridge Wells Recorder Festival. Glockenspiels are used from Year 1 – 6 to further develop the children’s music reading skills as well as for composition and improvisation.  Children are introduced from Year 2 to music technology and have fun composing and recording their work.

At St Matthew’s we love to sing!  As well as singing daily in our collective worship, we have a weekly singing worships where we learn modern and traditional songs, linked to our Christian faith. Singing is an integral part of our class music lessons and teachers often use songs to support other areas of the curriculum.

KS1 children use their singing and performing skills in our annual nativity which is a very special event and enjoyed by everyone.

Year 6 Production

To celebrate their time at St Matthew’s, Year 6 put together an amazing production every summer.  Despite the 2020-2021 pandemic, they filmed their performance of ‘Wow! What A year!’ and it was absolutely epic!